Make My CRM Training Session Fun

August 21, 2019 1:03 PM

I will be leading a short (one hour) training session on our cloud-based CRM and need ideas on how to make it fun, interesting and useful. Have you attended a training that blew your mind? What did the facilitator do that made it successful? Are you an expert training facilitator? Share your magic with me!

I will be leading an hour-long session with my entire team, plus the CEO of our organization, and I really need to nail this! The team has varying levels of comfort with the platform (Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge NXT, if it matters), some skepticism, and perhaps one person who is outright resistant to using the platform at all. My main goal is to have the group play around on their laptops, increase their comfort level, see how the platform could be a useful tool for them - basically get past the fear of the unknown/ambivalence about a new tool. I want this to be super low-stress, fun and interactive. I thought about designing some kind of scavenger hunt, but I am afraid that might intimidate the people who are already kind of stressed/annoyed by the new platform. I would love to hand out prizes, but don't want to alienate anyone. What's the best way to make this interactive and inclusive?

posted by GoldenEel to Work & Money (5 answers total)

How many people do you have, and do you know who is at each of those skill levels? Because breaking them into groups and giving them some kind of competitive task to do -- competition between the groups, help and support within each group -- can help make the training more interesting. And dividing people into groups is a good way to counteract the different skills levels, because you can have the more experienced people actively helping the less experienced people, which is good for both people's skill levels. Make sure each group has an experienced person in it.

Put the hostile jerk in a group with the CEO so he has to be on his best behaviour.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:23 PM on August 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Wow, this all depends on what your goals (and the class' expectations are) for the session. If it's just an hour, they can't expect anything too detailed or in depth.

If what you're going for is a reaction like "Hey, this thing could be useful after all!" then I would identify the top three annoying, boring, or painful problems this platform can help with and set up a number of exercises where each group has to think through how they would solve the problem on their own. (e.g. emailing two hundred customers about a new product version, I dunno) Then lead them through how to solve the same problem with the snazzy new platform. "See, it's a snap!" For ROI, estimate the time saved. Execs like ROI estimates. Your coworkers will like being saved repetitive, annoying work.

So, a 15 minute intro and three 15 minute problem solving vignettes. Presto.
posted by cross_impact at 1:33 PM on August 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

We're heavily salesforce based in my office and our training team does a game during the essentials training called "Field or No Field" which I have never taken but assume is based on Deal or No Deal. People seem to...actually enjoy it? Training then announces the match results somewhat breathlessly on chatter, which allows people to congratulate and/or smack talk the winners, and that's also fun. (The losing team is never a loser, they always seem to be very narrowly beaten out during the final heat after a valiant showing, so no one feels bad about it.)

Competition, especially game show like, is always a good way of engaging people more with learning a bland topic.
posted by phunniemee at 3:27 PM on August 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

I do this for a living. Is there any reason you are in charge of this training, rather than your team taking the official training offered by Blackbaud? If you have a training package, you are already "paying" for training for all users. Having you double that work by creating your own curriculum duplicates already-existing product and content and takes you away from your daily job tasks. The course is called "Raiser's Edge NXT: Basics of Raiser's Edge NXT and Constituents," it is a one-hour recorded class with engaging video and a friendly narrator, and does exactly what it sounds like you're being tasked to do. You can sign up for it at BBU.

Just mentioning in case you weren't aware. If you're not sure if you have a training package, or are not sure how to access courses, feel free to PM me and I can help you out.

If you are doomed to offer this session to detractors... there's a saying, you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. I recommend polling your attendees to really get a sense of what they do on a daily basis that could be made easier by RE NXT. If the answer is "nothing," you are adding work on their plates instead of helping them and they will resent it. That's the way of the world.
posted by juniperesque at 5:36 PM on August 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've done trainings like this (Salesforce, but I used RE in a previous job, whee!) and I don't think you need to make it "fun", just make the exercises real-life examples of questions your audience would actually need to answer in RE. I think the skeptics haven't been convinced the platform helps them personally. If you can walk them step-by-step through a query that will make their lives easier when they've been manually searching on it in the past, they might actually get why "hey, this thing is really useful!"

imo, a game/contest/scavenger hunt will alienate the people uncomfortable with RE because they won't be able to solve problems fast, so they won't win.
posted by capricorn at 5:06 AM on August 22, 2019 [2 favorites]